The Night of the Big Wind was the most devastating storm ever recorded in Irish history. Known in As Gaeilge as ‘Oiche na Gaoithe Moire’, the hurricane of 6th and 7th January 1839 made more people homeless in a single night than all the sorry decades of eviction that followed it.

The most important thing to understand is that not all miles are the same. Most miles that we drive are very easy, and we can drive them while daydreaming or thinking about something else or having a conversation. But some miles are really, really hard, and so it’s those difficult miles that we should be looking at: How often do those show up, and can you ensure on a given route that the car will actually be able to handle the whole route without any problem at all? Level 5 autonomy says all miles will be handled by the car in an autonomous mode without any need for human intervention at all, ever.

So if we’re talking to a company that says, “We can do full autonomy in this pre-mapped area and we’ve mapped almost every area,” that’s not Level 5. That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?” And then what you’ll usually find is a little bit of hedging on that too. The trouble with this Level 4 thing, or the “full autonomy” phrase, is that it covers a very wide spectrum of possible competencies. It covers “my car can run fully autonomously in a dedicated lane that has no other traffic,” which isn’t very different from a train on a set of rails, to “I can drive in Rome in the middle of the worst traffic they ever have there, while it’s raining," which is quite hard.

Because the “full autonomy” phrase can mean such a wide range of things, you really have to ask the question, “What do you really mean, what are the actual circumstances?” And usually you’ll find that it’s geofenced for area, it may be restricted by how much traffic it can handle, for the weather, the time of day, things like that. So that’s the elaboration of why we’re not even close.

"SCE to off?" someone said. The switch was so obscure that neither of his bosses knew what he was talking about. "What the hell's that," blurted out Gerald Carr, who was in charge of communicating with the capsule. The rookie flight director, Gerry Griffin, didn't know either.

Sixty seconds had passed since the initial lightning strike. No one else knew what to do. The call to abort was fast approaching.

Finally, Carr reluctantly gave the order in a voice far cooler than the moment. "Apollo 12, Houston, try SCE to Auxiliary, over."

Now to to the point: Are the 25-day forecasts any good? In a word, no. Specifically, after running this data, I would not trust a forecast high temperature more than a week out. I’d rather look at the normal (historical average) temperature for that day than the forecast. Similarly, I would not even look at a precipitation forecast more than 6 days in advance, and I wouldn’t start to trust it for anything important until about 3 days ahead of time.

Beatiful dataviz of weather data from met.no, NOAA.gov, World Weather Online and Weather Central. The main graph includes: mean and percentiles of historical temperature data for time of year, the temperature and precipitation forecast over the chosen period, wind direction and speed, with hourly data. Very nicely done! (via Una Mullally)

Yes! short-term weather prediction and dataviz. I've been vaguely considering ideas along these lines recently, but these guys have gone much further. US residents, fund it -- I really hope this gets made and makes it to Ireland...

another weather forecasting service which may be more reliable than Met Eireann, this time from yr.no, the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. if only Met Eireann spent our taxes on something of this quality (via Stephen Mulcahy)

so Met Eireann's crappy weather forecasts are actually just what they give out "for free"; if you pay extra, they have more accurate forecasts. what a scam for a govt department! Handily though, they are mandated by law to give out decent forecasts to pilots -- which are available online